Stories from Illinois and Indiana

I just returned from a trip to Illinois and Indiana.  Thanks to everyone there who gave of their time and their memories for this project.  In writing this blog, I am conscious that there is no way I can present to you all of the information I gathered in any one trip or interview, and I know I'm leaving some people's stories out as I go along.  But nevertheless I hope that I can pull out some strong details that continue to deepen the story.  In Illinois and Indiana I learned more about some year-round efforts and some connections beyond Shiloh.

In Indiana I did some research at Christian Theological Seminary on Clinton Davidson, the man who bought the first Shiloh campground and whose New Jersey estate bordered the camp property.  There are a lot of fascinating details about Davidson, including his autobiography:

Davidson had become quite wealthy by selling life insurance to millionaire businessmen, ultimately in the grandest of all sales venues, New York City.  He had coined the phrase "estate planning" and had helped his important clients avoid paying taxes, for which they rewarded him handsomely.  In his book he writes that he learned about hard work, good service, and salesmanship by reading Bible stories.  For example, stories like Jesus's (who told vivid stories to get his point across), the prophets (who did not sugar coat what would happen if their hearers didn't act now), and Paul (who endured obstacles but never gave up).  Those attributes are important in business, he says.  I read the book; it is an interesting take on the Bible.  In the early part of the twentieth century, Davidson was one who helped usher the Church of Christ into middle-class Americanism.  And yet some of his ideas--he was a premillenialist, at one point he attended an instrumental church, and he was strongly in favor of racial reconciliation--did not go over well with all of the people who were the Church of Christ's heavy hitters of his day.  He was tired of the constant name-calling and denunciation he found in church publications, and so he bought his own journal, the Christian Leader, to promote positive Christian reporting.  In his autobiography he says of Shiloh, "One of my deepest satisfactions is the summer camp on my New Jersey estate.  There each summer five hundred children of all classes, races, creeds, and colors discover real American living and the love of God."  I don't know yet what he meant by his words "real American living," although there's an indication in something I've read that at one point the kids were taught about the founding fathers of America along with their camp Bible study.

Whatever "real American living" meant to Davidson, in New York it was a concept that couldn't be so easily pinned down.  The fact that in the first two decades Camp Shiloh reached out to kids in Manhattan is culturally significant because of the persistent diversity there.  New York City had always been a place of ethnic neighborhoods and widely diverse populations.  There were kids at Shiloh from many different backgrounds, and the stories don't all look alike, and they aren't always simple.  There were immigrant kids, church kids, kids of different colors, kids from all kinds of backgrounds and even different religions.  The Church of Christ professed that it represented pure New Testament Christianity, so that was what kids learned at camp.  One of the things Eddie Grindley was doing was trying to convince Catholic or Jewish kids to come to camp and expose them to what the Church of Christ believed of the Bible.  There were quite a few baptisms, carefully chronicled each year.  I wonder about some of those kids who were baptized at camp--I know I can't find and interview even a small fraction of them.  I wonder if changing religious viewpoints was complicated for them as they returned to their homes.  Was it wonderful?  Difficult?  A combination?

Ray and his sister were young Jewish kids from Yorkville in Manhattan.  Ray says he loved the city and his Hebrew faith.  They lived in the area where Eddie Grindley preached at nearby Eastside church, and so, just like Eddie always did, he came along and invited all the neighborhood kids to camp.  Ray's mom sent both of her children.  It was a strange experience for Ray and his sister to attend a Christian camp, but he says even as faithful Jewish kids they liked it enough to keep coming back.  But then everything changed. When the two children suddenly found one summer that their single mother had passed away, the only thing for them to do was to stay at camp the whole summer and wait to see what would happen to them.  Eddie arranged an adoptive home for them, people from another Church of Christ congregation not too far away.  Quite obviously Ray's life changed completely.  It was hard for him to adjust to new foods, new family, and, he says, new religious and cultural identity.  But he believed in the importance of adaptation.  And although it was hard for him to give up the faith of his biological parents, he was baptized as a teenager.  He grew deeper in his new faith, married a Christian woman, and now serves on Shiloh's board.  He says he feels his choices honor both his biological and adoptive parents.

The framed words say in Hebrew and in English
"Hear Oh Israel, the Lord Your God Is One God"

It's a good story.  I wonder how many more are out there and what they sound like.

Eddie Grindley was the public face of Shiloh in its young days, although he had lots of people who worked with him.  In an interview with Frances, I learned more about Eddie's desire to reach out to Manhattanites year-round, when camp was not in session.  I have read that he truly desired to create a support system for kids who had been baptized at camp.  But I'm also gathering that this was harder to do than he'd hoped, because fundraising needs kept pulling him away and because the community he was trying to build was in flux a lot of the time.  He tried to get Shiloh counselors to stay in the city to help.  In his unique way of convincing people to do things, Eddie asked camp counselors and art teachers and canteen directors, people like Frances, to stay in the city after camp was over.  They would move to the New York City area.  The women who said yes lived in a rented house together and went to help Eddie with his church, Eastside Church of Christ.  Eastside church was in the heart of bustling, immigrant-settled Yorkville in Manhattan, the same place that Ray was from.  Frances would work as a teacher during the week and help out with the church on weekends:

She doesn't have strong memories of Shiloh kids at Eastside, but it was through her work at that church that Frances did have a significant life-changing encounter.  At Eastside she met her husband, Ernie.  Ernie had responded to the church's evangelistic tract that he found stuffed in his pocket after a rough night.  He found that tract and began to think about it.  The next day he cleaned himself up and came to Eastside.  He became a regular member, and it was there he met and married Frances.  Eddie got him a job as a groundskeeper at Camp Shiloh, and Ernie often went with Eddie to encourage people who needed it.  They'd say, "Let's go jack up So-and-So," meaning go and lift that person's spirits.  Years later Ernie and Frances's son would meet the man who stuffed that tract into Ernie's pocket, and the two would have a tearful reunion.

Frances loved her time at Camp Shiloh and Eastside, and loved living in part of the big mansion that Davidson had purchased, while Ernie took care of the camp's grounds.

Eastside Church of Christ was sometimes billed as a follow-up program for kids from Shiloh, but it also was a place for a very diverse local community to gather on Manhattan's East Side.  One person who came to the church and encountered this community was Sam.  Sam discovered Eddie and Eastside while working in the city as an architect.  He soon found that watching Eddie constantly helping other people was affecting him, and later, too, his young wife, Flo.  They helped Eddie as he cleaned apartments, fed people, and provided basic services to local people in need, whether that person belonged to Eastside or not.  With Eddie's grinning approval, Sam had been adopted by a group of young gang members in the neighborhood who liked to meet in Sam's apartment.  Sam says to think of West Side Story when you think of those boys.  When Flo, newly wed and new to the city, came into the picture and took those young men to an art museum, she wore white gloves as she had been taught to do, but those boys roamed all around the museum and touched everything they were not supposed to touch.  Sam later tried to help one of the boys when he got into legal trouble.  He doesn't now know what happened to them.

City life was hard for Flo, who was from the country, and she missed the trees she had known before.  On the other hand, I've heard that lots of kids from the city, including Ray, were uncomfortable when they left the noise and the lights of New York City for the wide open spaces of camp.

Frances, Flo, and Sam all eventually left the area, but for a good while Camp Shiloh continued to draw its camper population from the connections that Eddie had made in the poorer east neighborhoods of Manhattan.

In the 1960s Eddie and Clinton Davidon both died.  In that same decade there was another Church of Christ born in the area, this one on Long Island.  It, too, would have a supportive relationship with Shiloh.  The West Islip Church of Christ had been created in 1964 when preacher named Dwayne Evans and a group of Church of Christ Texans decided to move to the Northeast where there was very little Church of Christ presence (they didn't realize there was already a West Islip Church of Christ there, but it was an instrumental church and they were not).  The new congregation of the West Islip Church of Christ were intent upon outreach and conversion of the local community.  But soon they began to realize the needs of the people in the area were deeper.  They sent a small group of people to live in East New York, Brooklyn, in one of New York's deepest ghettos.  

I talked to Don about this.  Don was among that group, and they rented East New York apartments to live like the people in the East New York community did.  In that place, Don would soon become profoundly aware of addressing the concerns of the East New York community he saw all around him, concerns including housing, jobs, and education, which had all suffered from external neglect and abuse for decades.  Men in suits would come into the area and proclaim that they could help the residents, but would often bring little more than words.  Trying to live like the community members did, Don and his schoolteacher wife Betty would not hesitate to vocalize their support of the people they worked with in the neighborhood, even in dangerous and deeply divisive moments like the Ocean Hill-Brownsville teachers' strike.  This strike pitted the local community against the teachers' union in an increasingly racial divide:

Schoolteacher Betty's button supporting
community control of the local schools.

Don's firsthand photo of the contentious school strike, 1968.

Don's group in East New York would be the precursor to Shiloh's year-round program, and Don would later serve as a consultant to that Shiloh program.  When new year-round staffers came to Shiloh's orientation program, it was Don that stood up and told them difficult things to hear about what it meant to serve in the neighborhood.  He said that kids in the community didn't need their love.  Their mamas already loved them.  He said what they needed was something else: education, skills, real and practical help.

Don and Betty were in East New York when the first Shiloh workers came to the area.  When the Shiloh program moved people into East NewYork on the street near where Don lived, Jo and her husband Bryan were among the earliest to move in.  Jo says she was naive when she first moved to East New York.  Their apartment was robbed almost immediately, and later even her baby clothes for her soon-to-come baby were stolen, too.  Still, she loved being there.  Her role was to care for her children, work with teenaged girls in the building, and do lots and lots of cooking.  She also had to scrub their apartment and then contend with some of the same frustrations as the East New York residents: roaches, rats, poor sanitation services, and other problems.  Jo says she was assigned the duty of smelling for smoke in the very real eventuality that the building caught on fire, a regular occurrence in those buildings.

While Jo was in the East New York apartment with her young family, and before he entered into a leadership position at Shiloh, Bryan coached a Shiloh basketball team of young men in the community.  That team became very important to Bryan and to the players as well.  When Bryan travelled, the team members looked in on Jo and her baby daily.  Sometimes the team went on the road together.  Here's the Shiloh team in Nashville college getting ready to play the freshmen at David Lipscomb College:

Nashville Banner article about the Shiloh team, the Renegades,
playing David Lipscomb College's freshman team, the Bison.
By the way, the Shiloh basketball team had
some of their things stolen while they were on campus.

Jo said her experience at Shiloh was a significant part of her life, and one that impacted her in many ways, including as a foundational part of her spiritual journey.

In these interviews and in this research, I've tried to explore moments of change in people's lives.  I've found Shiloh often is a point of change for people: of religious impulse, of identification with one group or another, or a dramatic change of location and circumstance.  And in all of those changes, the city itself has been changing, Shiloh's mission has changed over time, the Church of Christ has evolved, and Shiloh's financial circumstances have been variable at times over its history.  So it continues to be a story with multiple viewpoints and many tellers.  Each of the people I've interviewed has had a meaningful contribution to Shiloh's story, just as Shiloh has had a meaningful contribution to their own lives.


I'll tell you as I find out more. . .